Step two, Dissonance sets in. You then throw the multiple opponent, no rules, no weapons, card on the table and in your mind you dismiss all the new experiences of getting owned as not being realistic or very smart.

As always Kevin has omoplata'd the correct. The point I quoted reminds me of a story my BJJ coach John Will tells. His first night on a BJJ mat (Rorions school ims). He's a very experienced martial artist, multiple black belts, and editor of Blitz magazine. So he figures he's pretty good. Then he spends the night getting his ass handed to him up and down the mat by a tiny woman. This makes him unhappy and he spends the evening seething in his hotel room. He gets to the inevitable "The rules made me play their game, Why if I'd been allowed to eye gouge there's no way she would have choked me out 10 times..."

And then he stops.

And says to himself

"hang on- is this what my 20 years of martial arts training has come down to? Eye gouge or get choked out? Is that it, is that all I've got?"

So he makes the decision to start training and eventually becomes one of the first non Brazillian black belts in the art.

I like the story alot. The shift from performing every piece of mental gymnastics you can think of to defend your paradigm to suddenly being open realising there is actually something to learn here is something that has much wider application...

"When your only tool is a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail"